Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming on 28 January 1912. He was the fifth
and youngest son of LeRoy McCoy Pollock and Stella McClure Pollock. The family left
Cody when Pollock was less than a year old, and he was raised in Arizona and California.

After a series of unsuccessful farming ventures, his father became a surveyor and
worked on road crews at the Grand Canyon and elsewhere in the Southwest. Pollock,
who sometimes joined his father on these jobs, later remarked that memories of the
panoramic landscape influenced his artistic vision. While attending Manual Arts High
School in Los Angeles, Pollock was encouraged to pursue his early interest in art.

Two of his brothers, Charles and Sanford (known as Sande), were also developing as
artists. Charles, the eldest, went to New York to study with the Regionalist painter
Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, and he suggested that Jackson should
join him. In 1930 Pollock went east and enrolled in Benton's class at the League.
It was at about this time that he dropped his first name, Paul, and began using his
middle name.

Under Benton's guidance, Pollock analyzed Old Master paintings and learned the rudiments
of drawing and composition. He also studied mural painting with Benton and posed for
his teacher's 1930-31 murals at the New School for Social Research, where the Mexican
muralist José Clemente Orozco was at work on frescoes. Pollock's first-hand experience
of contemporary mural painting is thought to have sparked his ambition to paint large
scale works of his own, although he would not realize that aim until 12 years later.

Thomas Hart Benton, mural panels from
America Today, New School for Social Research, New York, 1930-31, now in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During the 1930s, Pollock's work reflected Benton's "American Scene" aesthetic, although
enriched by a brooding, almost mystical quality reminiscent of the work of the visionary
painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, whom Pollock admired.

Orozco's influence also made itself felt, especially after Pollock saw his dynamic
frescoes for Dartmouth College (1932-34). Other early influences include Picasso,
Miró, and the Surrealists, as well as another Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros,
who in 1936 established a short-lived experimental workshop in New York. It was there
that Pollock first encountered the use of enamel paint and was encouraged to try unorthodox
techniques such as pouring and flinging the liquid material to achieve spontaneous
effects.

Jackson Pollock (right) with David Alfaro Siqueiros (center) and George Cox at the
Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, New York, 1936

With the advent of the New Deal's work-relief projects, Pollock and many of his contemporaries
were able to work as artists on the federal payroll. Under government aegis, Pollock
enrolled in the easel division of the
Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, which provided him with a source of income for nearly eight years and enabled him
to devote himself to artistic development. Some of Pollock's WPA paintings are now
lost, but those that survive–together with other canvases, drawings and prints made
during this period–illustrate his complex synthesis of source material and the gradual
emergence of a deeply personal pictorial language.

By the early 1940s, Native American motifs and other pictographic imagery played a
central role in his compositions, marking the beginnings of a mature style.
Even as his art was gaining in assurance and originality, Pollock was experiencing
personal turmoil and recurring bouts of depression. He was also struggling to control
his alcoholism, which would continue to plague him throughout his life. His brothers
Charles and Sande, with whom he shared living quarters at 46 East 8th Street in Manhattan,
encouraged him to seek treatment, including psychoanalysis.

Although therapy was not successful in curbing Pollock's drinking or relieving his
depression, it introduced him to Jungian concepts that validated the subjective, symbolic
direction his art was taking. In late 1941, Sande wrote to Charles, who had left New
York, that if Jackson could "hold himself together his work will become of real significance.
His painting is abstract, intense, evocative in quality."

At about this time Pollock was invited to participate in a group exhibition of work
by French and American painters, including Picasso, Braque, Matisse and other established
masters. Among the virtually unknown Americans in the group was Lenore Krassner–later
known as Lee Krasner–who became Pollock's lover and, in 1945, his wife. The work she
saw in Pollock's studio convinced her of his extraordinary talent, and it was not
long before influential members of New York's avant-garde intelligentsia began to
share her opinion. His work came to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim, whose gallery,
Art of This Century, showed the most challenging new work by American and European
abstractionists and Surrealists. Guggenheim became Pollock's dealer and patron, introducing
his work to the small but avid audience for vanguard painting.

Frederick Kiesler, architect, and Peggy Guggenheim in the Surrealist Gallery, Art
of This Century, ca. 1943

In 1946 Guggenheim lent Pollock the down payment on a small homestead in The Springs,
a rural hamlet near East Hampton, Long Island. This property, now the Pollock-Krasner
House and Study Center, would be Pollock's home for the rest of his life and the site
of his most innovative and influential work. Before moving to The Springs, his imagery
had been congested, his colors somber, and the general mood of his paintings anxious
and conflicted. Soon after establishing his studio in the country, however, his colors
brightened, his compositions opened up, and his imagery reflected a new responsiveness
to nature. Soon he would pioneer the spontaneous pouring technique for which he became
world-renowned.

Although Pollock had first experimented with liquid paint at the Siqueiros workshop
in 1936, it would not become his primary medium until more than ten years later. By
1947 he was creating densely layered all-over compositions that earned both praise
and scorn from the critics. Some dismissed them as meaningless and chaotic, while
others saw them as superbly organized, visually fascinating and psychologically compelling.
Clement Greenberg, one of Pollock's most ardent supporters, maintained that he was
"the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to
be a major one."

With several one-person exhibitions to his credit and work included in important group
shows, Pollock was receiving significant attention. A profile in the
8 August 1949 issue of
Life magazine
introduced his challenging art to a nationwide audience and cemented his growing
reputation as the foremost modern painter of his generation.

Pollock's radical breakthrough was accompanied by a period of sobriety lasting two
years, 1948-50, during which he created some of his most beautiful masterpieces. In
his barn studio, he spread his canvas on the floor and developed his compositions
by working from all four sides, allowing the imagery to evolve spontaneously, without
preconceptions. Pollock described this technique as "direct" painting and likened
it to
American Indian sand painting. He maintained, however, that the method was "a natural growth out of a need," and
that its only importance was as "a means of arriving at a statement." The character
and content of that statement were then and remain controversial, subject to widely
varying interpretations--which is why Pollock's art has retained its vitality in spite
of changing tastes.

In 1951 Pollock's aesthetic underwent a shift in emphasis as he abandoned non-objective
imagery in favor of abstracted references to human and animal forms. "When you're
working out of your unconscious," he explained, "figures are bound to emerge." He
also gave up color to create a series of stark black paintings on unprimed canvas.
Many of his admirers were ambivalent about his new direction, which may account at
least in part for Pollock's inability to remain sober. For the next five years he
would struggle unsuccessfully to solve his drinking problem, while his art underwent
a series of revisions, some more successful than others. Color returned, gesture became
richer and more various, and Pollock once again veiled his imagery in layers that
obscured as much as they revealed.

By 1955, however, Pollock's personal demons had triumphed over his artistic drive,
and he stopped painting altogether. Ironically, his work had begun to earn a respectable
income for him and Krasner, who was becoming increasingly estranged from her troubled,
alcoholic husband. In the summer of 1956 she took the opportunity of a trip to Europe
to re-evaluate their relationship, while Pollock remained at home with a young lover,
Ruth Kligman, to distract him from the agonies of self-doubt and inaction that plagued
him. In Paris, on the morning of 12 August, Krasner received a telephone call informing
her that Pollock had died the night before in an automobile accident. Driving drunk,
he had overturned his convertible, killing himself and an acquaintance, Edith Metzger,
and seriously injuring Kligman.

The preservation and development of this unique site has been undertaken by the Stony
Brook Foundation, Inc., a non-profit affiliate of Stony Brook University, one of four
university centers of the State University of New York.